cannot type the letter o without activating a random character style. help!

[kim_at_brick]

I am unable to use the letter "o" on the keyboard. Everytime I try, a character style gets activated. The rest of the sentence, minus the missing "o" appears in red underline. What is happening? This is crazy frustrating. I have taken to using text edit to make small edits in the document and then using copy/paste.

This problem is present on any keyboard, native to laptop or external. It is not the keyboard. a colleague at my work experiences this too. please help with all due haste if you have a fix.

[Ashutosh_Mishra]

Hi Kim,

Sorry to hear about your experience. Would you mind sharing version of InDesign & OS? Does it happen on a specific document or all?

Have you tried resetting preferences?
**Please note that resetting preferences will remove all the custom settings and InDesign will launch with default settings. You can also take a backup of the folders in case you want to. Location is mentioned in the article.

Let us know if it helps. Looking forward to your response.

Regards,

Ashutosh

[kim_at_brick]

Mac OS Catalina 10.15.5 - just updated yesterday.

It was happening in 2018 before I updated to 2019 and then was stable for several months. now the problem is back in 2019, so I updated again to 2020. The problem persists.

I will try resetting preferences.

[kim_at_brick]

resetting preferences made no difference.

[pixxxelschubser]

Additional to what @AshutoshMishra said:

Before trying to reset your preferences I would do the following:

Please show us a screenshot of the behaviour with visible Character Styles Panel. Before and after typing an "o".

After then:

• save the document under a new name as *.indd
• save the document as *.idml
• close all documents and InDesign too
• restart your computer

• try to open the *.idml

 What happens?

• try to open the *.indd

 What happens?

[kim_at_brick · Accepted solution]

As I was creating my screenshots I fixed the problem. I isolated the character style and gave it a shortcut. something about that character style was confusing the "o" with a key command. If I started with O I did not get the same result. Just lowercase o.

Weird, but SOOOO glad it's fixed. Thanks for all your help!

[jcolivieri]

I am having this exact same issue. Please help! I am a beginner at InDesign and downloaded a template to use for a catalog. This one document just randomly started with not letting me type lowercase "o." It changes the character style and I don't know how to fix it.

[kim_at_brick]

click on the text that changed styles after you type the o. look at the character style dialogue box and see which style it is. Double click on that style. add a shortcut (like ctrl (or command on mac)+1 --any number

once you have added a shortcut and saved, you should be good to go.

I added screen shots below

[jcolivieri]

Thank you! Unfortunately, when I go to see what the character style is, it just says [none], so there is nothing to double click?

[kim_at_brick]

maybe check to see if there is another style (paragraph or object).

It's always been a character style for me, but could be a different sort.

–

kim

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